Trouble is brewing in Algeria. The rest of the world should take notice

Anyone looking for the world’s next big trouble spot – the next Syria, or Myanmar, or Yemen – could do worse than focus on Algeria. The oil-and-gas-rich North African republic, with its population of 44 million, is again threatened by the feuds that have marked its history since the departure of the French in 1962.

Students, in combination with women’s rights activists and the broader urban underclass, are once more on the march, demanding “peace, freedom and democracy”. The last time they took to the streets, in 2019, under the banner of Hirak (The Movement), the long-serving and increasingly absentee President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to resign. Now they want to see the back of his successor, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, aged 75, a leader of the increasingly threadbare National Liberation Front (NLF) for longer than most would care to remember and widely assumed to be in hock to the military.

Tebboune is not a strongman, unlike Bouteflika in his prime or the NLF’s foundational leaders, Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumédiène, the latter of whom overthrew the former after a no holds barred post-revolutionary struggle. The current President is ill and would like nothing more than a quiet life. But he may yet have to exert himself if he is not to go the way of Bouteflika, who, at the age of 82 and amid spreading chaos, was ousted by the army after attempting to run for a fifth consecutive term.

If he does go, Tebboune will have no one to blame but himself. A year ago, 12 months on from the emergence of Hirak as the pre-eminent catalyst for change, he declared 22 February a “national day of fraternity and cohesion between the people and its army” and gave a personal commitment to realise all of its demands. He then carried on much as before, hobnobbing with the generals, packing the courts with government loyalists and sanctioning the arrest and torture of dissidents. As a result, he can hardly have been surprised when Hirak marked 22 February this year by attempting a repeat insurrection.

In his search for a means of calming the popular mood, the embattled President was aided by the spread of Covid-19, which, though it is officially reported to have killed only 3,000 Algerians (against 86,000 in France), is undoubtedly a concern. Overnight, the country was placed in lockdown, complete with a dusk to dawn curfew and the sealing of all land borders. The army is once more a visible presence, working with the police to arrest anyone deemed to have broken the rules while conveniently stifling any appearance of unrest.

One early casualty of the crackdown was Rachid Nekkaz, a 48-year-old former real estate broker, who in 2013 renounced his French citizenship in order to run against Bouteflika for the presidency. Nekkaz, who had previously made a name for himself in France by offering to pay the legal costs of Muslim women convicted of wearing the burqa, has been active in Morocco as well as Algeria and has served time in prison in both jurisdictions. He was released from jail just last week, along with 40 other “prisoners of conscience,” one of them the celebrated journalist Khaled Drareni, as a goodwill gesture only to be re-arrested and beaten by police two days later while addressing a Hirak rally and taken to an undisclosed location. Nekkaz’s lawyers were today expected to lodge a formal protest against his detention and mistreatment, which has caused considerable anger and distress within the protest movement.

So far so normal, you might say, for a nation in which unrest has simmered for years without ever quite blowing its top. If that should change – and there are those within the country, including foreign diplomats, who are speculating that something more far-reaching could be on the cards – the risk to stability across the whole of North Africa is real.

Islamism is rife in Algeria. So is old-style socialism. The two are held in check by the military, whose top brass are universally acknowledged to be the final arbiters of what politicians and populists – the latter including radical imams – can and cannot hope to achieve. If these repressed instruments of popular expression should ever be released, the ensuing conflict, like a supercharged Arab Spring, could easily spread into neighbouring Morocco, Tunisia and Libya.

The position of France in all this is, as ever, central to perceptions of what might happen. The armed struggle between the long-time colonial power and Algerian rebels in the 1950s and early ’60s was at least as hard-fought, and even more marked by blood and dishonour, than the Vietnam war. As many as 700,000 Algerians were killed; 900,000 French settlers (pieds-noirs) were forced to flee the country. No other war of independence was as bitterly contested or as marked by butchery.

And yet, somehow, in spite of everything, France hasn’t quite gone away. In 2017, when he was running for president and hoping to win over Muslim voters, Emmanuel Macron visited Algiers, where he declared that the war had been a “crime against humanity” for which France owed an apology. Later, he set up an enquiry into everything that happened, only, when it reported back last month, for it to be dismissed as a whitewash.

Macron has been simultaneously applauded and condemned for his attempts to integrate Muslims in France into mainstream society by inviting them to embrace laïcité, or secularism, outside of the mosque. At the same time, with valuabe help from Algerian forces, he has continued to wage war against Islamist insurgents in the Sahel. What action he would take if Algeria descended into chaos, especially if that chaos acquired an Islamist edge, is hard to predict. He probably doesn’t know himself.

For the moment, however, the revolution is once more in abeyance. Covid has been co-opted in the name of peace. The question is, how long can the cork remain in the bottle? A second Battle of Algiers cannot be postponed forever.